I've disabled the Activitypub feature of my WordPress while I investigate the regular server overloads over the past few days. I'm not really suspecting these plugins to be the problem, but the only increased traffic I can see is of Activitypub. Even though that is still only a few requests per minute, a pittance in normal server terms, it may be too much for a simple WordPress on the smallest shared hosting.

These Activitypub requests are always coming from the same Mastodon server, and don't seem to relate to normal interactions with my posts. So blocking that server on the firewall is another thing I can try.

There are of course a lot of requests from search index and ai bots, and blocking these is also a next step, but that doesn't seem increased lately.